Forever Read Online Free PDF
Author: Pete Hamill
he caught him writing left-handed (“A sure sign of Satan’s presence,” he snarled), so the boy only wrote that way at home. There he had noticed that his father was right-handed, but his mother wrote the List with her left, though completely untouched by Satan and his wiles. He felt proud that he had taken a hand from each of them.
Robert was not as good at arithmetic as he was at reading and writing or even Protestantism. Once he got the hang of Protestantism, it was easy. Catholics were bad, Protestants were good, and the King of England was the greatest man alive in the world. But arithmetic, at first, was more difficult: abstract, without a story.
Seeing this weakness, his mother helped him with his sums, again turning to the turf pile to explain addition and subtraction. But then the boy would cite an example from his father’s forge, as if it gave proof of confused logic. If Da put four pieces of metal on the grid and melted them and banded them together into a sickle, didn’t that mean that two and two made one?
“Sometimes you think too much for your own good, lad,” his mother said, and laughed out loud.
Then one day near the end of the second year at St. Edmund’s, it all came together in some mysterious way. Robert was adding a column of about seven double-digit figures. He looked for the first time at the column as if it were a ladder. In his mind, he climbed up the right side, counting as he went. Twelve. Yes: Write down a 2 and carry the 1. Then he climbed down the other side and had 17, wrote it down and ended up with 172. The trick was to make it a journey, not a story with heroes and villains, Hebrews and Egyptians, just a going from one place to another, counting miles, maybe, or trees, or stone markers, or houses; the climbing of a ladder to the top step and then a climb back down. The boy admonished himself for wanting everything to be a story. And now realized that some journeys were not stories. On some journeys, nothing really happened.
You just kept taking steps. Once he had that in his brain, even arithmetic seemed easy. It wasn’t the same as a story, because it had no meaning, unless you were counting days and weeks and months and years and, eventually, centuries.
5.
T he boy was ten when they saw the strange people coming along the roads. Bran smelled them first and barked in his deepest basso profundo voice, running to the edge of the land to frighten them away from the Carson house. These strangers were not like the burly red-haired men who sometimes appeared in the forge. Bran knew those men and their strange language. These arrivals were ragged and thin and shambling, like trees without leaves, their eyes wide with need. The sight of them filled the boy’s mother with fear.
“Come in now, son,” she said. “Come in right now.”
She shouted to her husband down at the forge and then locked the doors and closed the windows. She whispered prayers. She watched the strangers from the window, where Da was shooing them away with a hammer in his hand. If they came near, even the women, even the children, she screamed at them: “Go away, please, for God’s sake, go away.”
Robert had never seen her like this before, she who was ordinarily so kind and generous with everyone who passed, and almost totally without fear. But these people terrified her, and as she held the boy close, she told him some of the story. About how such people had arrived years earlier, when they lived in another house, all of the ragged strangers coming from the west, heading for Belfast, and how they carried with them something called the cholera. And how his lost brothers felt pity for them and ran down with food and water, and these people (or people like them) hugged the boys and thanked them and in three days the boys were dead.
“My poor boys,” she said now, fighting tears, her voice a soft croon. “Those poor good boys. It was my fault too, because I didn’t know, I was ignorant, I told them
Robert was not as good at arithmetic as he was at reading and writing or even Protestantism. Once he got the hang of Protestantism, it was easy. Catholics were bad, Protestants were good, and the King of England was the greatest man alive in the world. But arithmetic, at first, was more difficult: abstract, without a story.
Seeing this weakness, his mother helped him with his sums, again turning to the turf pile to explain addition and subtraction. But then the boy would cite an example from his father’s forge, as if it gave proof of confused logic. If Da put four pieces of metal on the grid and melted them and banded them together into a sickle, didn’t that mean that two and two made one?
“Sometimes you think too much for your own good, lad,” his mother said, and laughed out loud.
Then one day near the end of the second year at St. Edmund’s, it all came together in some mysterious way. Robert was adding a column of about seven double-digit figures. He looked for the first time at the column as if it were a ladder. In his mind, he climbed up the right side, counting as he went. Twelve. Yes: Write down a 2 and carry the 1. Then he climbed down the other side and had 17, wrote it down and ended up with 172. The trick was to make it a journey, not a story with heroes and villains, Hebrews and Egyptians, just a going from one place to another, counting miles, maybe, or trees, or stone markers, or houses; the climbing of a ladder to the top step and then a climb back down. The boy admonished himself for wanting everything to be a story. And now realized that some journeys were not stories. On some journeys, nothing really happened.
You just kept taking steps. Once he had that in his brain, even arithmetic seemed easy. It wasn’t the same as a story, because it had no meaning, unless you were counting days and weeks and months and years and, eventually, centuries.
5.
T he boy was ten when they saw the strange people coming along the roads. Bran smelled them first and barked in his deepest basso profundo voice, running to the edge of the land to frighten them away from the Carson house. These strangers were not like the burly red-haired men who sometimes appeared in the forge. Bran knew those men and their strange language. These arrivals were ragged and thin and shambling, like trees without leaves, their eyes wide with need. The sight of them filled the boy’s mother with fear.
“Come in now, son,” she said. “Come in right now.”
She shouted to her husband down at the forge and then locked the doors and closed the windows. She whispered prayers. She watched the strangers from the window, where Da was shooing them away with a hammer in his hand. If they came near, even the women, even the children, she screamed at them: “Go away, please, for God’s sake, go away.”
Robert had never seen her like this before, she who was ordinarily so kind and generous with everyone who passed, and almost totally without fear. But these people terrified her, and as she held the boy close, she told him some of the story. About how such people had arrived years earlier, when they lived in another house, all of the ragged strangers coming from the west, heading for Belfast, and how they carried with them something called the cholera. And how his lost brothers felt pity for them and ran down with food and water, and these people (or people like them) hugged the boys and thanked them and in three days the boys were dead.
“My poor boys,” she said now, fighting tears, her voice a soft croon. “Those poor good boys. It was my fault too, because I didn’t know, I was ignorant, I told them